from Foucault, _Discipline and Punish_, English translation, pp. 26-27:
[The study of the] micro-physics [of power] presupposes that the power
exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy,
that its effects of domination are attributed not to 'appropriation', but
to dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings; that one
should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, in
activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess; that one should
take as its model a perpetual battle rather than a contract regulating a
transaction or the conquest of a territory. In short this power is
exercised rather than possessed; it is not the 'privilege', acquired or
preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic
positions -- an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the
position of those who are dominated. Furthermore, this power is not
exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who 'do not
have it'; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it
exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle
against it, resist the grip it has on them. This means that these
relations go right down into the depths of society, that they are not
localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the
frontier between classes and that they do not merely reproduce, at the
level of individuals, bodies, gestures and behaviour, the general form of
the law or government; that, although there is continuity (they are indeed
articulated on this form through a whole series of complex mechanisms),
there is neither analogy nor homology, but a specificity of mechanism and
modality. Lastly, they are not univocal; they define innumerable points of
confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of
conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of power
relations. The overthrow of these 'micro-powers' does not, then, obey the
law of all or nothing; it is not acquired once and for all by a new
control of the apparatuses nor by a new functioning or a destruction of
the institutions; on the other hand, none of its localized episodes may be
inscribed in history except by the effects it induces on the entire
network in which it is caught up.
[The study of the] micro-physics [of power] presupposes that the power
exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy,
that its effects of domination are attributed not to 'appropriation', but
to dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings; that one
should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, in
activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess; that one should
take as its model a perpetual battle rather than a contract regulating a
transaction or the conquest of a territory. In short this power is
exercised rather than possessed; it is not the 'privilege', acquired or
preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic
positions -- an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the
position of those who are dominated. Furthermore, this power is not
exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who 'do not
have it'; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it
exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle
against it, resist the grip it has on them. This means that these
relations go right down into the depths of society, that they are not
localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the
frontier between classes and that they do not merely reproduce, at the
level of individuals, bodies, gestures and behaviour, the general form of
the law or government; that, although there is continuity (they are indeed
articulated on this form through a whole series of complex mechanisms),
there is neither analogy nor homology, but a specificity of mechanism and
modality. Lastly, they are not univocal; they define innumerable points of
confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of
conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of power
relations. The overthrow of these 'micro-powers' does not, then, obey the
law of all or nothing; it is not acquired once and for all by a new
control of the apparatuses nor by a new functioning or a destruction of
the institutions; on the other hand, none of its localized episodes may be
inscribed in history except by the effects it induces on the entire
network in which it is caught up.